Tangible Seconds – Monster Truck Gallery & Studios

Áine Belton Undone, Doing performance, November 15th 6pm – 8pm

The Monster Truck Gallery is pleased to present, Tangible Seconds, a group exhibition of work by 2012 visual art graduates, curated by ACW participant, Jenni Taylor. The following information is taken from their blog:

Artists, Jake Bourke (NCAD), Barbara H. Larkin (DIT), Rory Mullen (Crawford College), Oisin Vink (DIT) and Helen O’Dea (NCAD) were selected based on running commonalities and contradictions throughout their practices. The artists were invited to show their work a second time while considering time passed since the graduate shows this year, as a tangible tool to assist further investigation and development of each piece. In addition to incorporating the gap between showing and re-showing a work, the exhibition invites associations with imagined, remembered, found and created conceptions of past events and eras. Remnants of architecture and romanticism, repetition of time and fictional narratives are explored. The dense amalgamation of artists’ practices aims to abolish our perception of clock time. Instead, the manifested understandings of the past are arranged and disordered in the space remembering and anticipating whilst existing in the present. Works exhibited take the form of video, installation, performance and photography.

As a result of a playful experimental process Helen O’ Dea’s work exaggerates and understates depictions of detritus and ruins. O’Dea tests out combinations of materials including concrete, glitter, flock wallpaper, rubble and rubbish. Through manipulating materials and playing with scale, O’Dea presents an understanding of fetishized remnants.

Archival and modernised pornography sourced online and edited by Oisin Vink, examine developments in sex and sexuality, since the birth of new media technology. Within the exhibited videos, pornographic film is studied throughout the three distinct eras of Victorianism, the postwar American sexual revolution and the dawn of the digital age. Through following this timeline, traditional romanticised notions are brought into question, and juxtaposed with the ever-changing sexual lifestyle developments in each era. Using the birth of online media as a focal point, the effect this technology has had on previous depictions of sex and sexuality is brought into question; highlighting the consequence the Internet has had upon the genre.

For his work Decline and Fall Rory Mullen utilizes the functionality of universal materials to construct a fictional narrative. Mullen’s narrative is based on nostalgia for a time that may never have existed. The gallery space is converted into a bed-sit that pulsates, longing for what has been. Made of humble materials the piece is treated as a mnemonic place for the imagination.

In a series of printed and projected images More Richter than Bacon Barbara H. Larkin reworks found photographs ranging from 1910 to the 1990s. This addition to the series titled Resurrection (Doubles) continues to adopt a deadpan reproduction of found images devoid of context.

A final repetition of an initial act, Act Three concludes a series by Jake Bourke. Performed in October 2011 Performance with 52 Screws 23 Pieces of Wood 2 Sheets of MDF began an investigation into the act of failing and the frustrating inability to translate experience. The initial work concentrated on the body in relation of structure and systems of order. Imposing a system of order was an art object, completed by the inclusion of the performer’s body. Following this Hardest Job explored the impossibility of resurrecting an initial experience. It was constructed from the components of the initial performance, which included sound, video and the material used.

Documentation of Performance with 52 Screws 23 Pieces of Wood 2 Sheets of MDF and Hardest Job are embedded in Act Three. Designed to deny access to any original content, Act Three is separated from an original act by both time and space and is an act of facile repetition. The work exists between the success of an illusion and the failure of that illusion to be maintained.

The selection and run up to Tangible Seconds examined each individual practice in context of one another. The exhibition arrives at an overriding fixed point, materializing a time passing while exposing each piece’s intrinsic understandings of a past located in a constructed present.

Kent based artist Áine Belton will perform Undone, Doing to explore negotiations with time through a temporal performance piece. Never at any fixed point yet situated in a continuous present Undone, Doing converses with the manifested works in the space. Áine Belton recently completed an MA at UCA Canterbury. The piece will be performed during the opening reception on November 15th 2012.